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Only about a dozen years ago Bletchley was inviting former codebreakers back for an annual reunion. I used to go along to hear the talks, meet some of them and get books signed, including by Betty Webb. I'm glad they eventually got the recognition they deserved.
We have almost lost the chance now to hear personal testimony of WWII. I've met several Battle of Britain pilots too, but the last died in Dublin recently:
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0318/1502596-hemingway/
In 2001 in the small town of Hartsville SC, one of the youngest code breakers gave his last two public talks. He had been hired by Turing because he was one of the few studying both math and German at the start of the war.
Besides being very interesting it felt odd to hear all this in such an out of the way place. Well after the war he collaborated on some books with a professor teaching at the college there.
Two years ago my mother's memory care home had an American Battle of the Bulge veteran and Bronze Star winner who was sharp as a tack.
He was 99 and said he just wanted to live to be 100, but sadly he didn't make it.
I remember my late grandmother telling us they had made mittens for my great uncle, but he died in that battle before the mittens arrived.
Crazy to think I passed up my chance to have a cup of coffee with a man who might have fought beside my great uncle.
Most of them were told "Never, ever speak about any of this".
And they didn't.
Like the Zanryu Nipponhei [0], they were loyal to the last. Even my own father kept things about his airforce days way too tightly wrapped up long, long after the official secrets sell-by date. I have some admiration for this, but in the end it's a loss to historical record.
Consider it a blessing. Those orders were about controlling history much more than 'secrets': Many things done in war are later considered war crimes. Your admiration might have taken a hit had he started talking gleefully about the time he - just to pick a random example of things that happened - heroically shot fleeing "enemy" children on the ground.
It's insane how the largest conflict in human history is just now passing out of living memory. It's also insane how 1 in 4 Americans under 40 believe the holocaust is a fabrication or exaggeration.
Do you have a source or are you flamebating[1]?
The myriad of trash google results on the topic aren’t even close to 1 in 4. Even an Israeli tabloid says it’s 1 in 10.
I am not flamebaiting, but I was wrong. See the economist link in the sibling comment, which contains the original story as well as an explanation why the results are inflated.
Was widely reported but was discredited.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/07/one-in-fi...
> It's insane how the largest conflict in human history is just now passing out of living memory.
Don’t worry, there will be another one along any minute now.
It seems more than coincidental that global fascism started to rise as soon as the generation that last defeated it had mostly died off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...
Definitely controversial academically, but the idea of a generational cycle has been considered.
It's much simpler to think that as a society we've manufactured a similar set of circumstances to the last time. That is, a growing proportion of the population that feel they have very little and no prospects or hope.
I won’t enter into a conversation about inequality and social justice, even though there are indeed points to be raised.
I would however like to point out that people are not only victims of society, and that they have a responsibility as a critical member of society and an elector. Historic awareness, understanding of economics, law and geopolitics.
To give an example: Mr Trump was not just votes into office, but RE voted into office. His plan was public for all to see.
More than 50% of American voters voted for him. I am having a difficult time to believe that 50%+ of the US are economically oppressed that had no choice but to vote for Trump.
Inequalities exist but they do not justify everything, neither do they explain everything.
>More than 50% of American voters voted for him. I am having a difficult time to believe that 50%+ of the US are economically oppressed that had no choice but to vote for Trump.
I think it's important to be accurate with this stuff. 49.8% of voters voted for Trump, approximately 32% of eligible voters voted for him, and roughly 23% of the population voted for him. Don't discount apathy, disillusionment, and disenfranchisement in all this.
You make an interesting point, but there's an issue that significant resources are put into making sure that people do not understand economics, law and geopolitics properly. Economics is particular egregious in that the academic discipline is, for the most part, complete horseshit, and popular economics is a bastardised version of that. Geopolitics is also filtered heavily through whatever lens one views it.
Inequality is very different to no prospects, or no hope.
Totally agree. But does that not reinforce my point?
Or are we saying now that 50%+ of the US has “no prospects or no hope”? Really?
Anyone thinking that is sorely mistaken about how good we have it, and I’m afraid is soon to find out. Destroying the apparatus of state and destabilizing international relations is not going to be good, certainly for those “with no prospects or hope”.
And that was not difficult to foresee.
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The American Revolution was 240 years ago. The US Civil War was 160 years ago. The Second World War was 80 years ago...
Feels like cherry-picking.
WWII had very little to do with America in the sense that the American involvement was only a reaction to others messing things up.
While the other two are purely American.
WWII had little to do with America? Go look up lend/lease and then remember we were bombed by Japan. The US was intrinsically linked to WWII from the beginning, just not with troops on the ground.
Yes but the cause was not American. And USA was pretty reluctant to be dragged in (not Roosevelt but the voters).
I am just pointing out that you can make up any list in hindsight and make it look like Nostradamus prophecies.
Where is french revolution or the great war in that list?
> Yes but the cause was not American.
Yes, it was. America was setting up the scene for the pacific war by raising customs and tariffs on Japanese imports with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (1930). The Japanese were just democratizing when the US decided to kill their economy. Thus, the Japanese had one of two choices - take needed resources they purchased before by force, or accept a massive decline in standard of living. They decided to take the first route. Attacked the Chinese, and when the US started sanctioning it, eventually they bombed Pearl Harbour.
And don't forget how the Nazis were basically funded out of American pockets.
Just because the first shot was not fired by an American does not mean they were not the cause.
Yeah I guess the great depression was one of the reasons for WWII and USA had a stake in that.
My objection was just about bringing numerology into the discussion.
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What, no WW1?
the power of disinformation on social media platforms is apparently stronger than classroom teaching. it doesn't help that what is taught in classrooms is just getting worse for $reasons which is only going to get worse now that states are going to do whatever they want with schools now.
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social conditions are deteriorating so people are reaching for alternative explanations. you want people to reach for true history? then you have to show them true history will benefit them. fortunately, there is a way to do this, but powerful people hate it and prefer patriotic history and disciplined workforces instead. then they blame minorities for the problems they cause.
It is rather lazy that people 'prefer' patriotic history and 'disciplined workforce'. I see no evidence of this.
I do gather that some parents are rather sanctimonious and scandalized about their children learning anything but the most sanitized version of history. That seems so far to be the most presence in banning anything. Witness Harry Potter being listed as one of the most challenged book at the height of popularity.
History as it was taught in my grade school years certainly wasn't whitewashed and they are rather explicit about some of the horror. Moreover, the problem is that history wasn't taught well and made 'boring'.
>> Moreover, the problem is that history wasn't taught well and made 'boring'.
This. 100% this. At school we got an extremely biased view of history, but even then it was taught soooo badly.
History (regardless of viewpoint, correctness, or accuracy) could be an enormously exciting topic. It's full of things that would appeal to any child when presented well.
But school history curricula for me was full of meaningless names, dates, actions - endlessly repeated with no enthusiasm at all.
Fully agree. My kids consider(ed) history to be very boring, other than when I teach them about it. I thought I disliked history after coming out of high school because the classes were always so excruciatingly boring and felt so irrelevant to anything "modern day." As I went through my early career I found myself constantly wondering "why is X that way?" Personal research including reading books written by historians who actually tell the story and also describe the many various links between events, and especially the "other side" of many of the issues (that's particularly fascinating regarding the USA "founding fathers" as they were far from a cohesive single-minded unit as presented in most history classes) many things started to click. When I've taught my kids about history using the same approach, especially zeroing in on the real fascinating aspects of it, they still don't love history but they have a strong appreciation for it.
By way of example, "the founding fathers were Christians" is a classic oft-repeated phrase I continually hear, to which I love talking about Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, all of whom were clearly agnostic (at the time, they were "Deist" which was essentially equivalent to "agnostic" nowadays). Thomas Paine's phenomenal book "The Age of Reason" was utterly mind-blowing and extremely radical at the time, receiving widespread banning and igniting firestorms in the culture. It's still a great read today! Especially fascinating when you consider this was many decades before Darwin would provide one of the most important scientific explanations that massively shrunk the area for God of the Gaps.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear. Real history is much more persuasive. US elites love patriotic history and try to enforce it in schools.
I agree with you, but I would also add that real history is also typically much more uncomfortable, for nearly everyone. It can also be legitimately controversial as there's truly a lot that we don't really know, particularly around people's motiviations and sometimes true beliefs. For example it was common practice for people to burn any letters that didn't reinforce or support what they wanted history to remember. It takes someone with real dedication towards separating themselves emotionally from the topic to attempt an accurate portrayal, and that is a rare quality indeed. Certainly not a quality widespread enough to be present in every middle school and high school history teacher (though there are some excellent ones out there).
Some examples of the discomfort: to many white people now the history of slavery and racism is deeply uncomfortable. It's not even difficult to find hard evidence of such as many racist attitudes persisted well into the era of recordings and have been immortalized in movies and TV shows. I suspect a big part of that is the recency effect since we're still living with many follow-on effects of the practice even if we don't practice it actively anymore.
Much less talked about though is the history of racism and slavery among nearly all people at different times. For example a large majority of the black slaves that were sold to Europeans (including the Europeans living in the Americas) were originally enslaved by other black Africans and sold to the slave traders. Not all the slaves were sold either. To be fair the Spanish (at least in first half of the new world exploration) didn't have much of a problem doing the enslaving themselves as they routinely enslaved native people's after conquering them. We can also go back millenia and see the same behavior. Greeks, Romans, Persians, pretty much everybody had their slaves for as far back as history is recorded (and surely much, much farther).
We like to think we are enlightened nowadays, but I think history really demonstrates that as humans we are almost universally inclined toward enslaving other humans. Hopefully we're irreversibly past that now and well on our path to the Star Trek society, but even if that is the case it doesn't make the history any more comfortable.
I think white ppl (i’m one of them) should get over themselves. We’ve been the bad guys of history and we need to face it and correct course. It’s not written in our fate, it’s in settler colonial ideology and capitalism. We can adopt a new outlook in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and the world and make a fairer more decent world. Being uncomfortable is ok
The vast majority of nations teach an (at best) sanitised or (at worst) jiongoist version of their own history in their classrooms. The US is not an exception.
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> She and her guests were treated to a fly-past by a Lancaster bomber. She said at the time: "It was for me - it's unbelievable isn't it? Little me."
That's fantastic! RIP.
I did the tour of Bletchley Park today and my Tour Guide said he'd met Betty Webb, that he mourned her loss, and that when he had met her at a reunion, she had remained tight-lipped about what her work had been on.
From wikipedia:
some tasks performed include registering messages on little cards, which Webb believes totaled 10,000 a day in the whole park, and organizing the cards into shoeboxes according to a strict order so they could be retrieved efficiently when called for.
I suppose times have changed.
More interestingly IMO:
> In Block F, she worked on intercepted Japanese messages, something she excelled at so much that she was later sent to Washington to support the American war effort.[6]
they called them computers for a reason
Technology has changed for sure. Is our usage of human capital any better as a whole? Probably not. So many BS jobs out there.
tech has changed, but it's fundamentally doing the exact same job. GCHQ/NSA is still using the techniques pioneered at Bletchley.
Somewhat unrelated: I'm hoping to go to Bletchley Park this summer, any recommendations?
The main 'Bletchley Park' exhibition is good, but it focuses on the human experience of the code breakers. Head around the corner from the car park to the National Museum of Computing (also on the Bletchley Park site) to see more technical exhibitions: they give proper demonstrations of the machines invented at Bletchley, as well as the oldest working computer in the world (which was computing prime numbers when I visited).
Also, and not obvious, because these two entities are distinct despite occupying the same site: they're not always open at the same time. So if you want to see both, even if you plan to spend more time at one than the other, check they're both open.
Whether something is the first computer is - inevitably - a definitional argument, but TNMOC has several candidates (though not all of them) including (a modern reproduction of, the original was destroyed as a secret) Colossus which is famous because of its involvement in the war.
Bletchley Park is also still an actual stateley home, all the war stuff was built on somebody's grounds - there's a good chance you either don't care about stately homes or you're intending to visit a more interesting one (or indeed one of the Royal Palaces), in which case no need to care, but that's a third distinct thing on the same site.
[Edited to make clear there is no original Colossus, we destroyed it because it was a secret]
We have a few such odd arrangements, such as the "London Bus Museum", which isn't in London but is in fact entirely within a completely different museum, the Brooklands museum.
Operationally independent, although they have been considerate enough to synchronise their opening hours.
If you're interested in London Buses however, I'd actually recommend the (also unrelated) London Transport Museum, as this one is located in the tourist heart of central London in Covent Garden.
( NB: Brooklands is itself a great museum, but more for the aviation history )
Although the London Transport Museum is fun (some years back I decided to spend a week in my own capital city as a tourist, staying in a hotel in the centre, all day looking at stuff with tourists - and LTM is one of the things I decided to do) like most museums it does have a lot of stuff it can't display - but unlike most museums those things are sometimes huge like a bunch of buses, so they're not in a back room they're an entire other site, in Acton IIRC, the Depot, which is in fact open this weekend: https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/depot-open-days
Is Brooklands the place where the corner at the Silverstone racing circuit is named after? It's also known for its aviation history of course.
Yes, there was a race track at Brooklands. Some sections of it are still there including some steep banked track.
I wouldn't skip the main exhibition area. In an era where people were called computers, the human experience was at the heart of the Bletchley Park machine. In the main area, you learn about the makeup of this apparatus: the different roles people had, how information flowed within and between the huts, and much more. There's also a little museum with fascinating artifacts and an area dedicated to Turing. Don't miss it.
Agreed, it is well worth visiting both.
I don't know if they are still in print but Bletchley Park Trust published a great series of monographs on particular aspects of the codebreaking story there. Highly technical, written by specialists, sometimes by people who had worked there. I picked up a load of them when I was there and can recommend.
Definitely enjoy the scenery. I've done Bletchley and the National Cryptologic Museum, the former is in a genuinely beautiful location, especially if you have sun.
They have a neat computer history museum there so make time for that too.
This book, written by the man who created and ran the organization responsible for distributing the decrypted messages to political and military leaders: https://archive.org/details/ultrasecret00wint/
Really shows the extent and impact of this knowledge - they virtually sat at the same table as the Nazi high command.
Did her colleagues use to say "My first computer was a ... Betty Webb" ?
Any good book that delves into the detail of the code breaking done at Bletchley park?
This is a great book and touches on the subject you mention https://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/
Having read this book, I set some codes for my son to break. Each code, once broken, told him the location of the next coded message. And they got progressively harder. It was a fun challenge.
The author of this book also runs an excellent weekly maths newsletter/quiz for 11-16 year olds, and it's free:
The Hut 6 Story, goes into enough detail that Gordon Welchman (Simply put, Turing's boss) lost his security clearance. If you care about the human side, but are keen to take on the details there's no better book possible.
Another vote for The Hut Six Story.
The title includes ‘Six’ not ‘6’ (not that it should trip up a search algo, but you never know)
Apparently some computers still aren't able to crack the simplest encryption schemes.
On the American side, "The Woman Who Smashed Codes" by Jason Fagone is really good.
If you want a book in the same vein, and contemporary with Bletchley "Turning's Cathedral" by George Dyson is about the Institute for Advanced Study and the Manhattan Project. Needless to say there's a lot of overlap and it really defines the culture of computer engineering at the time.
If you would enjoy loosely related fiction, Neal Stephenson Cryptonomicon is an option I would personally recommend. You must have some tolerance for his particular style and content…
Or Enigma by Robert Harris.
"The Theory that Would Not Die" by Sharon McGrayne has a good chapter on this, book is a more general history of Bayesian statistics.
I really like the four-part documentary series called "Staion X" which was all about Bletchly Park. It has numerous interviews with the folks that worked there -- they were a bunch of excellent oddballs, for sure.
It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel. Only when the Med fleet intercepted and sank all his resupply ships did Rommel's crew finally lose.
The Germans' overconfidence in the Enigma machine was a big part of their downfall, especially once America's resources came to bear. Of course, that's what they deserved for having a leader speedballing meth and morphine.
All that said, the interesting historical twist is that no WWII history before the 1970s is accurate because all the Bletchly work was completely classified until one of their officers wrote a book about it. They cover that in the documentaries, too. There were men and women who had never told their families about what they did during the war, until the news finally broke. One mentioned how her daughter wondered why her mom knew that 'M' was the 13th letter.
>It's a really fascinating perspective on WWII and how crap Monty was at being a general; he was reading the Germans' messages and still couldn't defeat Rommel.
He did defeat Rommel though, didn't he?
And he defeated him twice. In the desert in 1942 and in France in 1944. Not bad for a crap General.
Eisenhower defeated Rommel, my friend, with Patton's brilliant help, dragging a limping Monty along by the hair. He was nearly sacked for insubordination.
The Germans only feared one Allied General, and it wasn't Monty (it was Patton).
If fact, Patton being relieved of command for slapping his soldier allowed him to serve as the uber-decoy in Great Britain to distract the Germans from being ready for a Normandy landing. God works in mysterious ways, indeed.
The Germans thought Patton's sacking for slapping a soldier was a ruse; that's how much esteem they had for him.
Yes, by rather a masterstroke of deliberately extending Rommels supply lines and fighting a giant staged battle at Rommels limit. By doing so he destroyed or captured much of Rommels men and material, rather than just pushing him back. All of which he did after a string of other Generals failed on the same front.
"They" defeated Rommel. No one can say whether he would have done so without Bletchley. Personally, I doubt he would have done so without the Med fleet utterly destroying all of Rommel's resupply train, but that's just my opinion.
@dang For the sake of Dave Täht and Betty Webb, I believe a black bar is justified even on the 1st of April.
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It hurts to see the generation that won WWII pass, not the least bit because we seem to have forgotten the lessons from their struggle.
Indeed, it is very easy to forget the struggle when one has sacrificed nothing to achieve it.
At least WWII, unlike those preceding it, has a vast well of literature to draw those lessons from. The trouble, however, is not just getting younger people to sit, read and analyze it, but also to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, with all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things that would make this list exceptionally long.
Books, are not the same as having lived it, of course. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it best in The Gulag Archipelago.
“If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'
Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”
Ha, maybe I should read (in translation) some Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I recognised his name having never seen it in print but only heard it repeatedly in that episode of Game Changer where it's a loop and the same questions are asked repeatedly.
There's an audiobook these days too, but the short clip I listened to was pretty rough because the narrator (Frederick Davidson's) voice is very pinched and nasal, with the audio quality sounding like it was recorded in a tin can. I'm on the hunt for a better copy to add to my library, but yes, I think a re-read at this time sounds pretty good.
> all the propaganda and misinformation to be had these days about the events of WWII, the Holocaust, Hiroshima/Nagasaki and so many other things
I'm curious as to what sort of propaganda or misinformation you're referring to. I'm in Europe and I haven't seen much of it, but maybe it's different in the US.
Sadly go look at the "masculine" channels targeting young men on YouTube (Tate and his compatriots). There's a LOT of holocaust denial, rewriting of Hitler as misunderstood etc. We're both lucky to not be exposed to it regularly, but unfortunately in my work it's a thing I have to be aware of.
Worse, an entire generation of young men especially are being told that WWII wasn't what it really was. You see the results of this in the US but also eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary, across Europe where right wing parties are on the rise substantially supported by these young men.
There are several downvoted comments from butthurt Nazis in this thread.
Those comments appear to be from reincarnations of the same user. There are a few serial trolls who spew out terrible comments on HN and register new alts when their latest comments/accounts get killed.
it's not different in the US, there is not a market of misinformation about WWII here. There is the the anti-war left alleging that that the allies committed war crimes and their opponents rejecting those arguments, but it's easy to find what happened in Dresden, Holocaust, etc, the disagreement is on interpretation.
The allies most definitely committed war crimes - the Red Army was pretty brutal in Eastern Europe, for example, for literally no reason. As for the Americans, there is certainly ongoing debate as to whether the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were really necessary.
Fire-bombing a city full of civilians is probably also a war crime. Tokyo was not a giant aeroplane factory, it was full of Japanese citizens who we would consider innocents, "Grave of the Fireflies" is about that period† - the children literally starving to death isn't an exaggeration for the sake of making a sad movie - that's the reality of what we did to win.
Not to mention the US literally rounded up citizens who had Japanese ancestors and sent them to concentration camps. They apologised, decades later, but note these aren't enemy civilians who happen to be in the wrong place, they're your own citizens who merely look similar to the enemy.
Because the Americans sent babies to these camps for the crime of having ancestors born in Japan there will be a decade or so of people who have memories (albeit fuzzy ones) of this actually fucking happening to them after the people who fought WWII are dead.
† Grave of the Fireflies is set in Kobe, which was also fire bombed.
[Edited to specify that Grave is in Kobe]
Yea, it's not really the left that's the big proponents of this (maybe a few very fringe people). It's the ones literally given Nazi salutes at political rallies.
In their prime, they too forgot the lessons of their own ancestors struggle.
One of the films in the Why We Fight series opens by following a handful of very old men attending the 1941 Independence Day, or perhaps it was Memorial day, parade in Washington DC. The narrater later informs the viewer that these men are veterans of the Civil War.
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this seems unrelated to the post
He’s saying that her war efforts led to the British winning, but also led to the loss of their empire, culture, and race.
The user seems unrelated to reality. They keep reposting the same thing under different accounts.
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There seems to be an attack against this post, for some reason.
Fascists have recently become emboldened.
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qq - if her grave is unmarked, how will we know where to find it to "piss on it"?
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Overshadowed by Val Kilmer's death - I hope more people read this article! What a lady... RIP
Crafted by Rajat
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